Tina Askanius - Cardiff University

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Abstract This article situates contemporary forms of video activism in online environments within a historical trajectory of radical film recruited for Left thinking and action. Focusing on the remix ethos and aesthetics of political mash-up videos, the article suggests how revisiting the analogue precursors of digital video may help contextualise and understand new forms of video activism, and politically committed media practices more generally. In the first part of the analysis, I engage with some of the principal conceptual themes and aesthetics that shape the various hybrid genres of the kind of visual activism we see emerging in YouTube and similar video platforms today. For these purposes, I propose a typology for understanding the motley array of video documentary and documentation available online as a hybrid and diverse range of media forms for political investigation and portrayal. The second part of the analysis demonstrates how such mash-up practices play out on three distinct levels when digital videos are put in circulation online. First, political mash-up is understood as a set of material practices in which online content is mixed and repurposed, second, in terms of a convergence between different styles, genres and modes of address, and finally, the concept of mash-up opens up for an understanding of the blurring of boundaries between different political actors and motives in online media environments. Contributor Note Tina Askanius is a post-doctoral researcher in the Department of Communication and Media at Lund University, Sweden. Her research concerns the relation between media and political engagement with a particular focus on contemporary forms of video activism in online environments. Her recent work within this area has been published in international journals such as Journal of Communication, Journal of E-politics, Interface: a Journal for and About Social Movements and Research in Social Movements, Conflict & Change. cf.ac.uk/jomec/jomecjournal/4-november2013/Askanius_Mashups.pdf
Introduction Convergence, hybridity, and found footage re-appropriation are defining features of contemporary online video activism and political discourse in a digital age more generally. The practices of remixing and re-framing moving images for political purposes have however been around since the invention of film. Over time such media practices have been given many names: media jamming, détournement, found footage filmmaking, avant garde film, television hacking, guerrilla television, telejusting, political remix, subversive remix, scratch video and fan vidding, along with more stagy designations such as cultural terrorism or cybernetic guerrilla warfare (McIntosh 2012). The political use and critical potency of such remixes is thus not fundamentally new in itself or confined to the qualities of what we today understand as new media. The same applies to the subversive practices of (illegally) distributing non-licenced video and film material at the heart of current controversies over intellectual property, which have a long history in Left-leaning communities formed around the ethical frameworks of remixing and sharing cassette bands, bootlegging tapes in underground distribution channels, community film screenings or post order mail lists (see e.g., Hilderbrand 2009). Yet something remarkable and unprecedented is taking place in terms of the magnitude of the phenomenon, the speed by which these memes and remixes travel online and the motley range of different actors who engage in political video practices today. Contemporary forms of video activism are increasingly situated within the market logics of social media and remix ethos of online user-generated cultures. www.cf.ac.uk/JOMECjournal This has profound implications for the set of longstanding political practices formed around the ethical frameworks of watching and sharing tapes and to how we understand and critically examine such practices. One arena where these developments are particularly evident is YouTube , the world’s largest audio-visual repository and video-sharing platform. This article proposes an understanding of contemporary forms of video activism as political mash-up genres emerging in a ‘post-broadcast media ecology’ (Merrin 2008). By situating digital video practices on YouTube within a historical trajectory of video activism recruited for Left thinking and action, the study suggests how revisiting the analogue precursors of digital video may help contextualise and understand contemporary modes of video activism, and politically committed media practices more generally. In the first part of the analysis, I engage with some of the principal conceptual themes that shape the various stylistic genres and aesthetic forms of vernacular political video we see emerging in YouTube and similar online environments. For these purposes, I propose an exploratory, typological scheme for understanding them as distinct genres that, despite their variations, are united by purpose, practice and to some extent form. Rather than an exhaustive inventory, I consider the proposed typology to be a point of entry into a broader discussion of how we might understand these ‘genres’ in relation to an increasingly complex set of media flows and circuits of distribution and consumption across intertwined and hybrid communication networks (Chadwick 2013). The second part of the article further extends the terms of the analysis by placing political mash-up genres on 1 @JOMECjournal
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Tina Askanius - Cardiff University

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